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Text by Justin E. H. Smith

Here are the credentials that, I hope you will agree, qualify me to speak of superhero movies.

Among the after-school television offerings when I was a child in the 1970s, one could still find Adventures of Superman (1952–1958) in rotation, the classic black-and-white series starring George Reeves, in which our old-school hero looks like nothing so much as a pair of pyjamas stretched over a barrel of whiskey. That was a good show.

A few years later in 1978, Christopher Reeve made his appearance as Superman on the big screen. I watched it and felt an inarticulate sense of loss. He was too handsome, as if he should rather have been playing in The Thorn Birds (1983) to the satisfaction of desirous suburbans. It seemed to me, not for the last time, that reboots are always bad, and they’re bad because they aspire to be “better” – slicker, more contemporary, with handsomer stars, more dazzling effects and more saccharine sentiments. This was all made up for when Richard Pryor appeared in the third instalment of what is now called a cinematic “franchise”, Superman III (1983), and did his thing, playing the conflicted villain Gus Gorman who figures out how to embezzle the unpaid half-cent remainder of an evil company’s pay checks. It didn’t matter what the story was, for simply in doing his thing, in being who he was, Richard Pryor made whatever dumb thing he appeared in ipso facto great.

Some more years went by, and then I saw Michael Keaton in Batman (1989), and this time it seemed to me our bland leading man had been unsuccessfully transplanted from the set of Mr. Mom (1983). Some more years went by, and then I found myself sitting with my young nephew, and on an enormous TV screen a massive airship was levitating over a planet, and a whole crew of stars, some of whom I recognised, for their beauty (Scarlett Johansson) or for the talent I had associated with them from other kinds of cinematic experience (Mark Ruffalo). Here they now were, along with those of their cohort I could not identify by name, playing characters of the sort you do not see in everyday life, who are, for example, big and green (this one I knew from Lou Ferrigno’s turn in the role back in the old days: The Incredible Hulk) or normal-sized, but some sort of Viking deity.

Everything on the screen, except the human faces, was as fake as the fantasy scene on the backboard of a state-fair air-rifle shooting gallery. It might as well have been a cartoon. For all the pride it seemed to have in its own high-resolution aesthetics, it appeared to me to lack even the verisimilitude of the most crudely sketched Hanna-Barbera character. With the advent of 120Hz LCD display and the infamous “soap-opera effect” this brought to the home-cinema experience, everything on the screen looked to me far too crisp, in a way that was meant by the movie’s creators and the television’s designers to capture “reality”, but that in fact only captured a nauseating plusquam-reality, where unbelievably advanced technologies are marshalled for something that looks like shit, that holds the attention of any true adult less firmly than a primitive animation cel bearing the likeness of Magilla Gorilla.

David Hasselhoff on the set of The SpongeBob Squarepants Movie, 2004.All images courtesy David Strick/Redux/eyevine

Where has my old world gone? I wondered, and my mind wandered to invisible things, even as I enjoyed the quality time this movie was affording me with the boy.

Some years after that (research now tells me the film in question was The Avengers in 2012), I would try to watch Black Panther (2018) on an airplane. I got through about 20 minutes before I had to turn it off. It was just too stupid, and, in the schizoid break its flight of fantasy seemed to have had with the brute political forces of our all-too-real world, far too sad for me to bear.

I could be mistaken, but as far as I know this is the last proper fragment of a superhero movie I’ve seen, though I regularly see bits of trailers on YouTube, GIFs and stills on social media and ads on the sides of buses.

I am, to say the least, no enemy of hero tales. I have spent the past several years immersed in Eurasian traditions of heroic epic, particularly those centred around the figure of the bogatyr, in its East Slavic variant, or bootur, in one of its prominent Turkic renderings. I have been translating, for a forthcoming volume in the University of California Press’s “World Literature in Translation” series, portions from the Olonkho epic-poetry tradition of the Sakha people (also known as Yakut) who live in north-eastern Siberia. Here is a representative passage from the epic Modun Er Sog˘otox, a title that might be translated as “Brave Man Alone”:

Brave Er Sog˘otox,Nimbler than a black wolverine,Leaping from a thawed patchLanded skilfullyIn his strong smooth saddle…Flinging his head, he sat right down,Searching out the ringsOf the grinning horse tack,Pulling at them strongly,He struck the horse with his knout,And set off on his way.The depressions from his horse’s hoovesTurned into the deep beds of lakes,The twisted bark of treesTransformed into ferocious bears and ran away,The trees themselves, having crumbled into dust,Turned into old Tungus womenAnd stayed behind wailing.

As I was copying this out, the image of the wolverine reminded me that I also watched Logan (2017) on an airplane once. This was the final instalment in the Wolverine trilogy starring Hugh Jackman, and was supposedly “made for grown-ups”, with “realistic” human drama and “gritty”, “noir-inspired” visual inspiration. But borrowing or signalling aesthetic continuity with past genres or bodies of work that have earned their place in our artistic canon does not guarantee entry into that canon, any more than Maroon 5’s odious “Moves Like Jagger” places Adam Levine on a par with that song’s eponymous rock-and-roll pioneer. It is, rather, a cheap trick played on philistines, equipped to recognise the source of a cinematic or musical “shout-out”, and to delight in this recognition, but not equipped to judge relative artistic merit when confronted with an original work of art and its faint derivative echo.

No contribution to the superhero genre exemplifies this philistinism more perfectly than Joker (2019), which, I now realise, I also watched on an airplane. Joker uses astoundingly obvious visual references to Taxi Driver (1976) with no deeper purpose than to make its viewers say to themselves or their seatmates: “Whoa, this is like Taxi Driver.” Of course, it is not “like” Taxi Driver, for there is a difference in cinematic language between standing on the shoulders of giants and simply riding in their wake. In the one case it is a matter of honouring your masters, in the other it is a futile effort to hide the fact that you’ve got nothing new to offer, your tank is empty, your art form has run its course, and all we are seeing now is its final sputtering out.

I will grant at least that Joker is not just a death throe but also a sort of swansong of the cinematic art, in which some of the more beautiful scenes of this art’s history flash before our eyes and comfort us. The death throes on display in the great majority of superhero movies are much more painful to watch, as nothing of cinema’s history is placed in review, nothing of this history seems even to be known at all, let alone recapitulated, whether out of reverence or simply in an effort to trick viewers into a self-congratulatory “this looks like that” moment.

As I was saying, it is certainly not that there is anything inherently silly or artistically unworthy about heroic epic – quite the contrary. Part of the value of Homer’s Odyssey or of Siberian Olonkho indeed lies in the familiarity of certain universal tropes also common in the Marvel Comics universe. It would be cool to be able to fly or to freeze time in place, and we delight like little children in any tale from anywhere that summons such feats
to our imaginations. There is nothing wrong with this. Imagination is a great gift.

There is additional value, which it takes some work to access, in all the unfamiliar tropes of other epic traditions, everything that is mysterious, archaic, and open to uncertain interpretation, as when Odysseus identifies himself to the cyclops as “Nobody”, or when Gilgamesh’s friend Enkidu is shunned by the gazelles, with whom he once ran freely, after his tryst with the prostitute Shamhat.

The events, motivations, and even the language of images are foreign to us, as in this description from Modun Er Sog˘otox of the mountain path that leads to the realm of the abaasy or demons:

“The Lower World lies down that path,”He thought, looking out,As if upon the taut throatsOf nine cranes,As if upon the ribbed palateOf a six-year-old stallion.

What does a six-year-old stallion’s palate look like, exactly? And how does it differ from that of a younger or older horse? And how could the sight of it be so familiar to anyone that it is what comes naturally to mind when looking out at a natural landscape? I have no idea, but I love it.

There is a limited set of tropes that can be assembled to generate all possible scenarios of heroic epic, wherever in the world it occurs. Yet beyond this formal combinatorics, there are differences, from culture to culture, in the inner lives of the hero and his enemies, in the values that are reinforced or questioned in the tale, and above all, for us aesthetes, there are differences in the visual language, in the arsenal of go-to metaphors. I find myself fleeing to Siberia to find paths to the underworld described by allusion to the inside of a horse’s mouth, rather than simply staying at home and resting content with our available stock of no less culturally specific metaphors. And when I get there I wonder why I am more or less alone, and even my coevals are talking about the latest CGI-smothered pop-cultural offerings as if they were wandering through the ashes of the Library of Alexandria and could find only a single fragment of papyrus to recover and study.

The inner motivations of the heroes, the values expressed, and the metaphorical language deployed in the features of DC or Marvel are, by contrast to what I have described in classical Greece, Sumer or Siberia, substantially the same as those we may presume the audience members to hold already, part of a common language that in its essence is shared with rom-coms, police buddy flicks, and even the occasional “grown-up” drama that happens to get greenlighted these days. The movies, as we know them today, serve the principal purpose of reinforcing the boundaries of our present world.

This claim is not just compatible with, but indeed corollary to, a further one: the demotion of movies to this role comes at a time when the world, in reality, is cracking clean open and we are fast losing the shared traditions that included a common artistic language and art forms with a life-breath in them that came down through the generations, just as the oral epic of Siberia is not only a living art, but also a channelling of the ancestors.

Elephant wrangler on the set of Deep Impact, 1998

The movies, as we know them today, are a symptom of panic, a desperate effort to hold up the boundaries of our world. Their function is policing, and it should not be at all surprising that so many superhero movies thematise and uplift the work of the police or their vigilante assistants. Whether it is the policing shown in the movie itself or the policing function of the movie in relation to its audience is in turn only one instance of a broader technologically facilitated streamlining of the range of acceptable language, thought and artistic motifs constituting our shared imaginaire.

The particular technology in question is the algorithm, which regulates language on the internet through hidden rules that propel some expressions centre stage and leave others on the sidelines. It is fundamentally the same technologies as those structuring social media that increasingly structure everything else, including education, labour, finance, and indeed, what is left of cinema.

Stephen Fry mentioned to me recently that several decades ago Hollywood perfected the technique of monitoring the eyeball motions of test audiences, and of refining the final product in a way that enhances whatever the first viewers found most entrancing on the screen. Curiously, the sight of money always proved more seductive than any possible competitor, and two hands exchanging a fistful of dollars on the left side of the screen would invariably get more eyeballs than a naked person standing on the right.

As with policing, whether money is on the screen or not, it is always what these movies are about. This has always been the case, to some extent, and as Fry reminded me, the producers of entertainments made of feedback loops did not need to wait for the era of ubiquitous online metrics to figure out how to give audiences exactly what they “wanted”. The difference today, as we witness the death throes of the cinematic art, is that the production companies are hedging their bets, putting out content that is entirely the product of “customer feedback”, optimised for safety rather than crafted for the sake of the art form itself.

There was never “pure cinema”, of course. The studio system, for example, cranked out generic features in bulk simply to meet contractual obligations, which on the face of it seems even worse than algorithmic optimisation. Even when some loyalty to the ars gratia artis principle – which long served as the motto of MGM – is retained, as for example in “indie” features, far too often the financial challenges of funding such ventures are so great as to be thematised within the indie output itself (see for example the opening number of Leos Carax’s 2021 Annette).

It is also true that we would have had no Renaissance Dutch masters without their patrons, and noticing the economic basis of all artistic output makes no difference for our diagnosis of some of the characteristic features of an art form in its moribund phase. The “dream factories” of golden-age Hollywood gave us mostly generic schlock, but it was schlock radiant with hope and as-yet-unfulfilled potential. The stylisation of manners and the stereotyped language that we now associate with the star turns of Cary Grant or Katharine Hepburn were, for better or worse, the imaginative wing of the massive 20th-century project of creating a new world, rather than the project the movies have come to serve in our present century, the regulation and streamlining of the only sort of world we are likely to know any time soon: the world of technologically mediated “soft” authoritarianism.

As I’ve already noted, I love heroic epic and as should be clear by now I also love the cinematic art form, and am sad to see it die. I love it in its high and low expressions, and although I am most satisfied by human-scale films without any effects at all, I am aware that as early as Georges Méliès’s Le Voyage dans la Lune (1902) one of the specific potentials of film-making has been seen as bound up with its power to make impossible things seem to be happening.

Fine. Yet the range of such fantastical scenarios is not exhausted by representations of flight, strength or interdimensional travel. The pinnacle of the art-form, in my view, was reached by French director Robert Bresson in his film Au Hasard Balthazar (1966), which depicts key scenes from the life of Christ as lived by a lowly donkey, the titular Balthazar. Now, in one way, this is a movie of “special effects”, too. The real donkey does not know that it is acting, let alone that it is standing in for the saviour of the world. The animal is made to appear as if this is what it is, simply by careful composition and editing. And the life of Christ – as the relatively more schlock-prone Martin Scorsese also understands, even as he has come to stand for the “highbrow” position relative to superhero movies – is nothing if not epic.

Bresson described himself as a “Christian atheist”, and believed that this sensibility was particularly well-suited for making good movies. One catches in his work glimpses of the transcendent breaking through into ordinary reality, in vivid black-and-white. All we see in the frame is immanence, but there is always a sense, one could not say where it comes from, of what lies beyond the frame.